The student run newspaper for St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin. Since 1929

98 Percent Crap

BY KIMBERLY JAHNS

There are crappy people out there; selfish, disrespectful, ugly-on-the-inside people. We interact with many of these people every day; we just do not know it because of the positive, ray-of-sunshine mask they are wearing.

It’s not hard to be nice for a 30-minute period or for a brief interaction. When you start getting to know people and realizing who the core of the person is, that’s when the ugliness comes out. The core is a nice soft doughnut, but, where the filling should be, there is just an empty pocket of air.

Even if I’m having a stressful day, I can put on a happy face to talk to my co-workers or friends and then go right back into my cloud of anxiety. We all have to do it or we would walk around with our hearts on our sleeves, and that would be emotionally exhausting. We put on faces in order to not seem like bullies, criers or needy, in order to be accepted for a time.

Many of us trick ourselves into thinking these rotten-to-the-core people are actually good. My hope, my optimistic hope, is that people are inherently good, and we try to see the good in every person, which is why we take their small acts of kindness and exaggerate it to their whole being. When a person is two percent doughnut and 98 percent selfish, arrogant and jelly-less, we seem to pay attention to the two percent.

In most other circumstances we would pay attention to the large percentage screaming at us, yet when it comes to people we seek out any glimmer of hope that they are a good human being. If we received a 98 percent on an exam, we would probably be pretty pumped, and we wouldn’t focus too much on the two percent we didn’t get. We wouldn’t assume we failed the exam because we received two percent incorrect.

If a person is crap, the two percent should not matter. Cool, they held open the door for another student; wow, they were being a decent human being. Let’s not inflate the few kind actions of the crap people. We are scraping the bare minimum when we do that; they said ‘hi’ to me, they looked at me, they smiled. My dog can do two out of those three things (in case you were wondering my dog has yet to learn to say ‘hi’). My dog is better at being a human being than they are. Raise your standards for human beings.

I will probably continue to try to see the good in others for my own selfish sake in that I want to believe everyone has some good inside them. But recognize that some people are beyond saving, beyond goodness and actually crappy. Crappy people seem to enjoy living the life they live, and who am I to try to change their ways? I just choose to try and live my life in a trying-to-be-kind, respectful, jelly-filled way.